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Predictability and great design are not friends.

Fred Brooks

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Fred Brooks
Age: 93
Born: 1931
Born: April 19
Computer Scientist
Engineer
Mathematician
Software Engineer
University Teacher
Durham
North Carolina
Frederick Phillips Brooks
Jr.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
Frederick Phillips Fred Brooks
Jr
Frederick P. Brooks
Frederick Phillips
Predictability
Design
Friends
Great

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The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.
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Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowcharts they'll be obvious.
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I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
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Improving your process won't move you from good to great design. It'll move you from bad to average.
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Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
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System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.
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The boss must first distinguish between action information and status information. He must discipline himself not to act on problems his managers can solve, and never to act on problems when he is explicitly reviewing status.
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Nine people can't make a baby in a month.
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Product procedure...must securely protect the crown jewels, but, equally important, it must eschew building high fences around the garbage cans.
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The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful we must outgrow it.
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There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.
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Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
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The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification, and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.
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The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.
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Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them.
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Study after study shows that the very best designers produce structures that are faster, smaller, simpler, clearer, and produced with less effort. The differences between the great and the average approach an order of magnitude.
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Successful software always gets changed.
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Originality is no excuse for ignorance.
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We tend to blame the physical media for most of our implementation difficulties for the media are not ours in the way the ideas are, and our pride colors our judgement.
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Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.
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